The
U.S. news media’s reaction to Ronald Reagan’s death is putting on display
what has happened to American public debate in the years since Reagan’s
political rise in the late 1970s: a near-total collapse of serious
analytical thinking at the national level.

Across the U.S. television dial and in major American
newspapers, the commentary is fawning almost in a Pravda-like way, far
beyond the normal reticence against speaking ill of the dead. Left-of-center
commentators compete with conservatives to hail Reagan’s supposedly genial
style and his alleged role in “winning the Cold War.” The Washington Post’s
front-page headline – “Ronald Reagan Dies” – was in giant type more fitting
the Moon Landing.

Yet absent from the media commentary was the one
fundamental debate that must be held before any reasonable assessment can be
made of Ronald Reagan and his Presidency: How, why and when was the Cold War
“won”? If, for instance, the United States was already on the verge of
victory over a foundering Soviet Union in the early-to-mid-1970s, as some
analysts believe, then Reagan’s true historic role may not have been
“winning” the Cold War, but helping to extend it.

If the Soviet Union was already in rapid decline,
rather than in the ascendancy that Reagan believed, then the massive U.S.
military build-up in the 1980s was not decisive; it was excessive. The
terrible bloodshed in Central America and Africa, including death squad
activities by U.S. clients, was not some necessary evil; it was a war crime
aided and abetted by the Reagan administration.

One-Sided Debate

That debate, however, has never been engaged, except by
Reagan acolytes who chose to glorify Reagan’s role in “winning the Cold War”
rather than examining the assumptions that guided his policies in the 1970s
and 1980s. Although it’s largely forgotten now, Reagan’s rise within the
Republican Party was as a challenge to the “détente” strategies pursued by
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger – before the Watergate scandal forced
Nixon from office – and later by Gerald Ford. Détente was, in effect, an
effort to ease the Cold War to an end, much as finally occurred in the late
1980s and early 1990s.

Cold Warriors Nixon and Kissinger – along with much of
the U.S. intelligence community – had recognized the systemic weaknesses of
the Soviet system, which was falling desperately behind the West in
technology and in the ability to produce consumer goods desired by the
peoples of Eastern Europe. One only needed to look at night-time satellite
photos to see the disparity between the glittering city lights of North
America, Western Europe and parts of Asia compared to the darkness across
the Soviet bloc.

Under this analysis of Soviet weakness, the 1970s was
the time for the West to accept victory and begin transitioning the Soviet
Union out of its failed economic model. Not only could that approach have
hastened the emergence of a new generation of Russian reformers, it would
have allowed world leaders to pull back from the edge of nuclear
confrontation. Third World civil wars also could have been addressed as
local conflicts, not East-West tests of strength.

But American conservatives – and a new group of
neoconservatives who would become the ideological backbone of the Reagan
administration – saw the situation differently. They insisted that the
Soviet Union was on the rise militarily with plans to surround the United
States and eventually conquer it by attacking through the “soft underbelly”
of Central America.

In 1976, then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush gave an
important boost to this apocalyptic vision by allowing a group of
conservative analysts, including a young Paul Wolfowitz, inside the CIA’s
analytical division. The group, known as “Team B,” was permitted to review
highly classified U.S. intelligence on the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly,
Team B came up with conclusions matching its members’ preconceptions, that
the CIA had underestimated the Soviet military ascendancy and its plans to
gain world domination.

Along with the Team B analysis came the theories of
academic Jeane Kirkpatrick, who made a name for herself with an analysis
that differentiated between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” governments.
In Kirkpatrick’s theory, right-wing “authoritarian” governments were
preferable to left-wing “communist” governments because authoritarian
governments could evolve toward democracy while communist governments
couldn’t.

Dark Vision

These two factors – the Team B take on the military
rise of the Soviet bloc and the Kirkpatrick Doctrine’s view of immutable
communist regimes – guided Reagan’s foreign policy. Reagan relied on these
analyses to justify both his massive U.S. military build-up in the 1980s
(which put the U.S. government deeply into debt) and his support for
right-wing regimes that engaged in blood baths against their opponents
(especially across Latin America).

As far back as the late 1970s, for instance, Reagan
defended the Argentine military junta while it was engaged in the use of
state terror and was “disappearing” tens of thousands of dissidents. Those
tactics included barbaric acts such as cutting babies out of pregnant women
so the mothers could then be executed while the babies were given to the
murderers. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Argentina's
Dapper State Terrorist."]

In the 1980s in Guatemala, Reagan aided military
regimes that waged scorched-earth campaigns against rural peasants,
including genocide against Indian populations. Reagan personally attacked
the human rights reports describing atrocities inflicted on hundreds of
Mayan villages. On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Guatemalan dictator Gen.
Efrain Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as "totally dedicated to
democracy" and asserted that Rios Montt's government was "getting a bum
rap." [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Reagan
& Guatemala's Death Files."]

Tens of thousands more people died at the hands of
right-wing security forces in El Salvador and Honduras, while in Nicaragua,
Reagan funneled support to the contras, who behaved like a kind of
death-squad-in-waiting, committing widespread atrocities against Nicaraguan
civilians while funding some operations with cocaine trafficking to the
United States. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

It followed, after all, that if the Soviet Union were
on the verge of world conquest and if that would mean permanent slavery,
then desperate measures were required. But the problem with the Team B
analysis and the Kirkpatrick Doctrine was that both were wrong.

The evidence is now clear that by the 1970s, the Soviet
Union was in sharp decline both economically and militarily. Rather than
some grandiose strategy for world conquest, Moscow was in a largely
defensive posture, trying to hold in line countries near its borders, such
as Eastern Europe and Afghanistan. The Helsinki Accords for human rights
also were putting the Soviet Union under greater pressure as dissident
movements, such as Poland’s Solidarity, took shape within Moscow’s sphere of
influence. [For more on the doctored intelligence of the Reagan-Bush era,
see Consortiumnews.com's "Lost
in the Politicization Swamp."]

Besides greater personal freedoms, Soviet bloc
residents wanted the higher-quality consumer goods available in the West.
Even a bigger threat to Moscow's power was the growing chasm between Western
technological advances and Soviet backwardness. By the late 1970s and 1980s,
the reletively modest assistance that Moscow handed out to friendly Third
World regimes, such as Cuba and Nicaragua, was more show than substance.

The Soviet Union had become a national Potemkin
village, a hollowed-out economy and bankrupt political system with nuclear
weapons. Along with the miscalculations of Team B's strategic analysis, the
Kirkpatrick Doctrine failed to stand the test of time. Democratic
governments sprouted across Eastern Europe and the Sandinistas conceded
defeat in Nicaragua – not as contras marched into Managua – but following a
lost election.

Indeed, if the Soviet Union had been what the American
conservatives claimed – a nation marching toward world supremacy in the
early 1980s – how would one explain its rapid collapse only a few years
later? After all, the Soviet Union wasn’t invaded or conquered. Its troops
did suffer losses in Afghanistan, but that would no more have brought down a
true superpower than the Vietnam defeat could have caused the United States
to collapse.

Bogus History

Despite these facts, the right wing’s historical take
on how the Cold War was “won” has been broadly accepted within the elite
opinion circles of the United States: Reagan’s hard-line stance toward the
Soviet Union caused the communists to crumble. Given how powerful the
right-wing media machine had gotten by the early 1990s, liberals largely
chose to cede the Cold War debate to the conservatives and tried to shift
the public’s focus to future U.S. domestic needs.

So, instead of a soul-searching examination of the
unnecessary loss of blood and treasure, the nation got a feel-good history.
Gone was any reassessment of the alarmist views associated with Ronald
Reagan and his ideological cohorts. Gone were any questions about whether
the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars on new weapons systems
was justified or whether the U.S. government should be held accountable for
the brutal excesses of counter-insurgency wars in Central America.

The unpleasant history was shunted aside or covered up.
When declassified U.S. government documents led to a judgment by a
Guatemalan truth commission that the Reagan administration had aided and
abetted genocide, it was a one-day story. When a CIA inspector general
confirmed that many contra units had engaged in drug trafficking and were
protected by the Reagan administration, the mainstream press only grudgingly
acknowledged the story. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

Another little-noticed part of Reagan’s legacy was his
credentialing of a generation of neoconservative operatives who learned the
importance of manipulating intelligence from Team B and about managing the
perceptions of the American people from the Nicaraguan contra war. As Walter
Raymond, Reagan’s chief of public diplomacy, was fond of saying about how to
sell the Nicaraguan conflict to the American people: the goal was to “glue
black hats” on the leftist Sandinistas and “white hats” on the contras.

George W. Bush’s strategy for rallying the American
public behind the War in Iraq – with hyped intelligence about military
threats and extreme rhetoric about the evil of U.S. adversaries – follows
the game plan drawn up by Ronald Reagan’s national security team in the
1980s. [For more details on the decline of the CIA's analytical division,
see Consortiumnews.com "Why
U.S. Intelligence Failed."]

Arguably, too, another troubling part of Ronald
Reagan’s legacy is the press corps’s stultifying version of recent American
history, a superficiality richly on display in the media paeans to Reagan
following his death.

In the 1980s, while with the Associated Press and
Newsweek, Robert Parry broke many of the stories now known as the
Iran-Contra Affair. He is currently working on a book about the secret
political history of the two George Bushes.

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